She touched my arm lightly. “You aren’t a fool, Jim,” she said. “You see what I mean.”
“Yes, I see,” I said bitterly. “I see. You think a full stomach is better than honor. Hell, perhaps you’re right. But, I don’t want you to be right. If you were, there’d be no use in anything. All the arts would be foolishness, all attempts at civilization would only be absurd. We—we couldn’t go on living. We’d all live in barricaded houses and kill at sight.”
She nodded humorously. Then she said, “Let’s not talk about it. It’s a lovely day.”
I felt like a silly and gawkish child who had been dismissed from intelligent discussion. I fumed and hated her as we walked along. She talked gaily and casually, but I did not answer. I could feel her amusement and self-satisfaction, and when I looked sideways at her and saw that she was smiling to herself, I knew that she was laughing at my silly mother and all her silly friends. And I knew I could do nothing. I could not put into words what I felt about her, and anything I said would only hurt poor Sarah.
Then an ugly and sharp realization came upon me with regard to Beatrice. Since Jack Rugby’s marriage to Amelia Burnett she had been all sweetness and humor and gaiety towards me. She had tried to keep from antagonizing me too much, and had appeared at our house unusually often on one pretext or another. Horror again struck me, and I moved away from her abruptly. She saw the involuntary gesture, and sighed a little, peeping at me furtively. She must have understood, for a few moments later she said: “Have you and Dan and Livy gone on any more bicycle rides lately? And why haven’t you asked me, too?”
“We haven’t gone,” I muttered.
“Is Livy’s foot still bothering her?” she asked with sweet concern. “I didn’t think so. It didn’t even swell. I wonder why’ she seemed so upset that day when she turned her ankle? Almost as though she had something on her mind. I wonder,” she mused thoughtfully, “if it’s because she thinks South Kenton doesn’t treat Dan right?”
“Perhaps,” I growled, then her words filtering into my mind with all their significance, I looked at her sharply. “What makes you think that? I can’t see the connection between her sprained ankle and her being upset and Dan Hendricks.”
“Don’t you?” she asked softly. And said nothing else. Her words hung in the bright and quiet air with a sickening significance.
“You’ve got an evil mind, Bee,” I said slowly. “If you’re trying to tell me that Livy likes Dan more than ordinary, he being just a friend, you’ve overshot your mark. What are you trying to say, anyway?”
“I?” She seemed hurt and surprised. “Why, nothing. Livy’s my dearest friend, and I love her dearly. I would never say anything about her, even if it were so. I’m sure Livy thinks only of you, Jim.”
We had come to her home now, and she exclaimed: “Mama must be home! The door is open.”
I wanted to leave her then, but I also wanted to see Sarah. I wanted to ask her some questions. I felt that in talking to her my threatened world would be set aright again. When we walked into the cool brightness of the little parlor we found Sarah rocking agitatedly in her gay little white chair, and sobbing dryly. She looked at us with anguished eyes and did not greet us. She only burst out:
“Jim! Bee! Poor Connie and her poor little baby died this morning! They caught cold during that rainstorm we had last week, and the barn roof leaking and all, and no one to take care of them but Connie’s poor father. It was lung fever. Two days ago something might have been done for them. But it was too late, though I did my best, sitting in that awful barn all night, with the mice and the dirt and the manure and the rats, and no light but a lantern, and that poor father crouching there in the hay, wringing his hands and sobbing! Not enough blankets, not enough food; no medicine. Oh, it’s a wicked world! And if there’s a God He’ll punish the wicked people who did this to a poor sick girl and her little baby!” She sobbed again. She looked old and ill, rocking there, overcome with grief. Her eyes were sunken, seemed fixed in their sockets from sleeplessness no and pain. “The poor baby, struggling for its breath, and the poor girl trying to nurse it in her fever, and looking at me and begging me to do something for it! Oh, I can’t bear it!”
“It’s very sad, I’m sure,” murmured Bee. She was ill at ease, and a crease of impatience came between her eyes. “But, Mama, you can’t do anything about it, now. Perhaps it was for the best.”
“Best!” Sarah’s gentle face flared with outrage and anger. “You can talk of ‘best,’ Bee! It’s never best, nothing is ever best, if it arrives there by suffering and injustice and cruelty! If you could have seen that poor girl—”
Bee’s voice, cool and practical, broke in on the threatened hysterics.
“You’re all tired out, Mama. And no wonder. I suppose you haven’t eaten anything since yesterday, and sitting up all night in the dampness. Let me help you to bed, and I’ll bring you a cup of hot soup and some tea.”
I hated her again, but I knew that she was right, and that it was best for Sarah. They seemed to have forgotten me. Beatrice helped her mother into the bedroom. I waited a few moments. I was shocked at what I had heard, but Sarah’s words had readjusted my shaken world for me, and I was relieved. I heard her sobs from the bedroom, but Beatrice said nothing. I went home.
Chapter Ten
South Kenton was ill at ease and unusually silent when the news came out about Connie Lewis’s death and the death of her child. Everyone seemed to avoid discussion of the subject. There was even very little denunciation when Dan Hendricks took the distraught Wally Lewis into his own house, and cared for the half-crazy sick man. In fact, to my amazement, a few hang-dog customers actually went into the store, and Dan had a hard time between taking care of them and ministering to Wally Lewis. Even my father, uncalled, went to see the miserable farmer, and prescribed for him. I thought he looked a little softened after his trips. A few more daring spirits actually hinted that Dan had a good heart, and my friend enjoyed a sort of side-door prestige and good feeling. But he seemed as indifferent as ever, both to the reviving of his business and the tentative good will of South Kenton.
Then one night, two days before I returned to medical school, Wally Lewis crept unseen from his bed and disappeared. They found his body in the creek near his old home. In his fever he had walked the five miles there in the loneliness of the night. He had left a scrawled and illiterate note for Dan:
“Thank you for what you done for me, Dan. There ain’t nothing more I can say than that. But you know how I feel. I can’t lay around on you any more, getting you in bad with the folks. That ain’t right to do, and I ain’t going to do it. I’m not saying anything about the folks hereabouts, and what they did to Connie. It ain’t no use, and someways it don’t seem to matter.”
The customers swarmed more than ever into Dan’s store, but he never answered questions. He was even curt with me, and seemed to wish that I would not come to see him. Livy went to see him, in the face of all the town, but she would tell me nothing. She looked very pale and abstracted, though she was very gentle to me.
I returned to school. I wrote to Dan several times before I received a short and indifferent letter, written with cold formality Behind the letter I could see his brooding eyes, his bitter thoughts. Then my father wrote irritably that Dan had not taken advantage of the furtively-offered good will of the community and had antagonized it again. I felt only weary impatience, and was glad to forget the whole affair and South Kenton in the pleasures of the city after school hours. Livy wrote to me, also, casual and affectionate letters, but she told me nothing.
Then my father wrote again and told me that the five acres of barren and uncultivated land far out in the country, which had been among the effects Billy Riggs had left to Dan, had yielded up five active gaswells. Dan was now comfortably “fixed,” my father wrote with visible annoyance. It had done no particular good with regard to that stiff-necked young fool. He had merely shut up his store, bought a nice little house and ten acre
s of good land about five miles from town, and had buried himself there. My father said that several people had called on him, had admired the place, and had asked what he was doing on it, but that he had shown no friendliness and had even indicated that return visits would not be welcome.
I wrote to Dan again, congratulating him, but I received no reply. I asked Livy news of him, and she replied shortly and indifferently. No one saw Dan much anymore. When he needed anything he went to Ripley for it, though he came into town quite often to visit Sarah and Beatrice Faire and Mortimer Rugby.
I suffered uneasiness for some time after I had received all this news, but soon the edge was dulled. I felt some resentment against Dan at his apparent desire to terminate our friendship. What had I done, anyway? I would not admit to myself that he was sick of all of us, of our hypocrisies and meannesses and smallnesses and cruelties. But I was indignant that he had included me in his silent indictment against South Kenton.
Chapter Eleven
It was two years before I returned home again, though my parents visited me on the two Christmases, and we all went to New York for the opera and the theaters. I took extra courses in bacteriology in the summers. For a time I had an idea of practicing in Pittsburgh or New York, but I knew inside that I was fitted only to carry on my father’s work and take his place. I still had what Bee had called “romantic ideals.”
I did not realize until I saw my parents that I was homesick for South Kenton, small and snobbish and narrow though it was, sleeping under its old trees and squabbling agitatedly, and living slowly and peacefully under the surface upsets. Small-town boy that I was, I had never stopped being bewildered and disorganized at city noise and city confusion. Life moved too quickly in the cities, too superficially, as though everyone was a mere shadow, going little shadowy ways through caverns of concrete and stone, and hurrying futilely from place to place. I longed for the static quality of South Kenton, where everyone was fixed and rooted, like the old trees about their shabby old houses.
I was eager for news from home, which seemed to meet my mother’s approval. Jack Rugby and Amelia had a baby girl; Mortimer had had pneumonia last winter and seemed a little queer since then. He was shabbier than ever, avoided people, had developed a fierce eye, and was always tramping the five miles to see Dan Hendricks. Dan drove him back to town but never entered the town proper. Sarah Faire had become very quiet these days; she was still the town seamstress and stylist, but did not come often to church and had refused, for the first time in many years, to take part in last winter’s church suppers and sociables. She had pleaded bad health, and my father admitted that she was very nervous and somewhat morbid; it was “her age,” of course. I had a few disloyal thoughts toward him; I did not like such glib diagnoses. I wondered what was the real trouble with Sarah. Willie Williams had joined his father Tom in the law business, and was making a great deal of money, being a smart young fellow. Ezra Hughes had had the quinsy; Mary Knowles had just sold a parcel of land to someone from Ripley for a very good price. Her daughter, Mary, had opened a real-estate office for herself and her mother, and they were rushing feverishly about all the time collecting rents and selling land. Mary, my father said, looked more like a man than ever. She had developed a great fondness for Jane Mundell, who had turned out to be a gentle and very feminine sort of girl with soft eyes and shy manners. It was real pretty, my mother added, to see the devotion between the two girls. I felt a slight qualm of nausea at this, and looked at my father sharply. But he was merely nodding blandly at what my mother had said. I wanted to mention the term for such devotion, but homosexuality was still not discussed in polite society, not even between men and physicians. It makes me smile now, listening to the young folks discuss it glibly and knowingly, with apparent modern candor, and such innocence!
As for Beatrice Faire, she was dearer and sweeter than ever, my mother said. She did most of the work now, since Sarah’s indisposition. She had bought a little pony, and because of her mother’s old affection for Dan Hendricks, she went out to his little farm and took him cakes and things that her mother had prepared for him. He lived alone, except for an old woman who, it was rumored, kept house sketchily for him. I detected no hint of disapproval in my mother’s voice when she spoke of Sarah’s kindness to Dan; Sarah was always so good, she commented.
Livy’s father had died. I knew that, and for the first time in almost a year I felt a quickening with regard to Livy. There had been other girls, and my thoughts of Livy had not been so frequent. Now Livy was teaching the district school since old Mortimer’s illness, and she was very satisfactory, though grown very quiet and quite thin. I remembered with a sudden pain that I had not heard from Livy for over a year, and I felt an urgency to see her. The children liked Livy, for she was honest and just and tolerant, not like other women teachers, my father added. Her father’s place had been taken by a young bachelor minister from Cartersville, and he was quite a catch, having an income of his own, which made it easier for South Kenton during the annual scraping up of his salary. He seemed to prefer Livy and Beatrice to the other girls in town, and Beatrice was quite frank in her pursuit of him, but Livy seemed indifferent.
“I suppose,” sighed my mother regretfully, looking sideways out of her eyes at me, “that Livy is one of those born old maids.”
I went home the next June, a full-fledged young doctor, seething with plans. Livy loomed largest in them. I had bought a full kit two years ago, but now I had the authority of a handsome diploma to use it. It was not quite so shiny as it had been, but I did not quarrel with it for that reason.
Even though South Kenton looked smaller and tighter to me than ever, I was delighted with it. I was further delighted when I arrived home. My father, as a surprise, had built an addition to the house, two small rooms fresh with paint and plaster and a nice rug and two desks on which stood bowls of flowers. Here we would practice our profession. I could not get over it, and my father beamed at my enthusiasm. I hung my diploma proudly over my desk, and stood off and looked at it with tears in my eyes.
There were several parties for me. I enjoyed the friendship and affection of my old friends, and went about busily before settling down to business. I saw Livy the first day I was home. Yes, she was paler than I had remembered, and thinner, and she had an almost permanently abstracted manner. But when she spoke she spoke in her old round manner, looking at me directly with honest and intelligent eyes, as though we were man and man together. There was no illusion in her eyes, but no disillusion, either, and that is quite a difference.
I was not home three days when I urged her to marry me at once. Why not, I said. She did not refuse me, but she evaded me for the first time. “Sometime,” she replied. She was busy now, and I was not yet settled. She smiled at me so kindly that I was cheered. She would not enter into a binding engagement, but I felt that things had been arranged between us. After that she would not talk intimately with me, but only of casual things. She and Beatrice had drifted apart somewhat, and did not meet very often. Beatrice, she added smilingly, was too busy trying to marry young Mr. Samuel Pringle.
“It seems to me that Bee is always trying to marry someone,” I said. “What’s this about her always going out to see Dan, with her mother’s cakes?” I spoke amusedly, but I was surprised at the sudden sharpening of Livy’s features, and her murmured evasion.
This was the first time I had given undivided thought to Dan, and I asked about him. Livy evaded me, and did not seem to wish to talk about him. He was all right, she said indifferently. No one saw much of him. She didn’t blame him much. He kept his money in the First National in Ripley, which made old Ezra Hughes pretty resentful. He did not seem to want anything to do with anyone in South Kenton.
“That’s nonsense,” I said sharply. I was already becoming as smug as the rest of my friends, and felt resentment against Dan. “He can take his place here as well as anyone, with all the money he is getting. It isn’t right to bury himself that way. He owes—”
“What?” Livy’s voice was quiet, but there was something in it that disturbed me. “What does he owe to anyone? Nothing. This town has treated him worse than shabbily; if it hadn’t been for the money he is getting from the wells he would have starved here. No one would deal with him, except old Mortimer and me and Sarah. Oh, Jim, I know what you’ll say, that his ways and everything cut him off from other people. He had no right to be different, you’ll say.” She looked at me thoughtfully, and with an expression of pain in her clear eyes. “You didn’t always think that, Jim.”
I started to walk about the room restlessly. Livy boarded with the Kings. Old Endicott had died nearly two years ago, but despite his large leavings to his wife and son, Mrs. King was avaricious and had welcomed Livy’s little board money. The parlor was shabby and dark, with frayed carpet and heavy old furniture. I hated it, could not bear to think of Livy in such a house.
“I was young when I thought differently,” I said. Livy smiled quickly, then became grave again. “Young men have radical ideas, Livy. But I know the world now. It isn’t right to antagonize other human beings when your livelihood depends on their favor. Even if it doesn’t, you are bound to be human and friendly. Dan has always been antisocial. There’s a medical term for that. It isn’t normal.”
“Normal,” repeated Livy thoughtfully. “What is normal? Smugness, narrowness, cruelty, herd-loyalty? Or is it abnormal to have a large eye, and understanding, and a desire to retain your own identity?”
“Oh, Livy, you don’t know what you’re talking about!” I said impatiently. I walked about again, and bit my lip.
Livy was silent for some time, then she said: “Have you been out to see Dan, Jim?”
I felt ashamed. “No, I haven’t had time yet,” I answered. “What on earth made him buy a place so far out like that?” I added irritably.
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